Upcoming refresh projects are driving enterprise investments in servers and converged infrastructure in 2016, with Cisco most likely to benefit over industry rivals HP, IBM and Oracle.

Research conducted by analyst firm 451 Research forecasts that among enterprises, 60 percent plan to increase spending on servers, while 79 percent plan to spend more on converged infrastructure during the next twelve months.

As such, spending on hyper-converged infrastructure will be particularly strong in 2016 with 86 percent of respondents planning to increase spend and over 32 percent planning a major server and storage refresh project.

But as the findings suggest, vendors will not benefit equally from spending allocations in 2016.

Cisco is expected to gain the most with 70 percent of its customers planning to increase spending allocations on its server portfolio while HP, IBM and Oracle had more customers planning to cut spending, than those planning to spend more.

Budgets are strong for the majority of converged infrastructure vendors - the newly formed EMC Converged Platforms Division, formerly VCE, leads in budget increases: 78 percent of its customers plan to increase budgets in 2016 with 32 percent in the ‘above $2 million’ spending bracket.

“We see a sea change in the industry with Dell’s acquisition of EMC/VCE, and Nutanix filing for IPO,” says Nikolay Yamakawa, Senior Analyst, 451 Research.

“These shifts are putting a spotlight on converged infrastructure and providing IT buyers with more options.”

Yamakawa says converged infrastructure vendors most commonly get into enterprise environments through a technology refresh project, especially a server refresh.

As such, decision-making authority on converged infrastructure is most often shared by general infrastructure staff and server staff.

But for Yamakawa, tthe ultimate decision to adopt rests with CTO/CIO, while management is most often delegated to cross-functional groups.

“To ensure success, vendors need to communicate with all converged infrastructure stakeholders in a target organisation and provide training early in the process to help with customer onboarding,” Yamakawa adds.

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